The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Lexicon

  The Gates of Tagmeth

  P. C. Hodgell

  Destruction is in Jame Knorth’s nature. Literally. She is the avatar of a god known as That-Which-Destroys, the god of chaos and ruin. Yet Jame is also a noblewoman within an ancient race, and the designated heir of her twin brother Torisen Knorth, High Lord of the Kencyrath. Jame’s people are fleeing, world by world, from a terrible enemy that has pursued them through a multitude of universes. Its name is Perimal Darkling.

  Obeying instructions from her brother, Jame sets out with a force of Southron warriors to reestablish the long-fallen castle keep of Tagmeth. By Jame’s side is Lyra, a devious Kencyrath noble girl who is determined not to be forced into a marriage with a man she despises. Jame’s old friends Mark and Brier Iron-thorn stand with her, as well: Marc, steward and organizer of Jame’s household and Brier, the only captain under her command wholly sworn to support Jame no matter the cost. Jame finds more allies in the forest surrounding the ancient keep where the wild people of the woodlands, the Merikit, hold court. And Jame’s adopted mother, Gran Cyd, matriarch and queen of the Merikit, may once again provide the voice of calm that Jame requires to survive her own tempestuous nature.

  Jame sets about establishing Tagmeth as an outpost against the gathering power of Perimal Darkling. But Tagmeth hides a secret, a gateway to a mystery that may save this world from eternal darkness—or plunge it to destruction and ruin all the sooner. It is up to Jame to find her way through Perimal Darkling’s traps, and to come to terms with the god of pandemonium and destruction within her who grows stronger every day. If she succeeds it may be that Perimal Darkling can finally be defeated after eons of fear and flight. And if she fails, yet another world will fall to darkness forever.

  Baen Books

  By P.C. Hodgell

  The Kencyrath Series

  Seeker’s Bane

  Bound in Blood

  Honor’s Paradox

  The Sea of Time

  The Gates of Tagmeth

  The Godstalker Chronicles (omnibus)

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by P.C. Hodgell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8254-7

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-602-8

  Cover art by Eric Williams

  Map by P.C. Hodgell

  First Baen printing, August 2017

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Dedication

  to Liz

  and Marc

  and all of the horses

  we have known

  Chapter I

  Gothregor

  Spring 50—Spring 60

  I

  JAME PAUSED IN THE DOORWAY of her brother’s tower study, blinking into the gloom. The room seemed empty, yet it breathed fitfully as the wind ebbed and flowed through it. In the open western window, up the chimney, through the doorway to the spiral stair in which she stood, out again, ahhhh . . .

  Papers rustled on the desk. Embers flared on the hearth, the last of a fire set on this chill evening in late spring.

  Perhaps I won’t have to face him just yet, she thought. Oh, first, for food, sleep, time . . .

  “Tori?”

  “Here.”

  His voice came from the shadows near the window, where he stood so still that her eyes had slipped over him. Back turned, hands clasped behind him, he was staring down into the inner ward, as perhaps he had been ever since she and her tired, hungry ten-command had ridden into Gothregor at dusk. Below, Brier Iron-thorn would be dismantling their little caravan, the cadets sent to dinner, their meager baggage to their new quarters, their mounts to the subterranean stable. The wind gusted again, bringing a grumble of thunder.

  “So you’ve come at last,” he said.

  “As you see.”

  Or would, she thought, if you turned around.

  But he didn’t.

  “I won’t ask if you had a pleasant journey. How is your shoulder?”

  Jame flexed it and winced. The broken collarbone would have healed by now if not for the past thirty-odd days in the saddle, despite Bel-tairi’s gentle gait. As for riding the rathorn colt Death’s-head, forget it.

  “Never had a broken bone before, have you?” Harn Grip-hard had said. “Everything will seem worse than it is until you get used to it.”

  Get used to it? Did one ever?

  “We made the best time we could,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “There were delays in Kothifir. Then it’s a long way north to the Riverland.”

  “So I remember, having ridden it many times.”

  Was he reminding her that, despite the fact that they were twins, he was at least ten years her senior? They had been allies as children, but that was long ago, before their father had ripped them apart. Now he was Lord Knorth and Highlord of the Kencyrath while she was only a second year randon cadet. Despite all that she had accomplished, the gap between them kept widening.

  “I thought we had agreed,” she said, then bit her lip, vexed. She hadn’t meant to lash out so soon, if at all; sometimes, though, he made her so very angry, and she had waited a long time to tell him so.

  Torisen’s shoulders twitched. “Agreed,” he said. “On what?”

  “That I was to qualify as a randon officer, if I could, with your approval and support. But I have a year of training yet to go—if the Randon Council doesn’t kick me out, and they may. Your summons has cost me my last season at Kothifir.”

  “From what Harn Grip-hard tells me, you caused quite enough trouble there with the time that you had.”

  Jame choked back a retort. Dammit, that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t triggered the failure of the Kencyr temple, or the civic disorder that had followed, or the descent of the Karnid horde upon Kothifir. Things simply happened whenever she was around. Should she tell him that she was potentially one of the three Tyr-ridan expected for millennia by their people? Worse, she was a latent nemesis linked to That-Which-Destroys, the third face of their despised god. Even without trying, how could she help but cause trouble?

  . . . some things need to be broken . . .

  That was hard to explain, however, when standing up to one’s knees in the rubble that had been someone else’s life.

  And Tori hadn’t helped matters by summoning her back to Gothregor prematurely.

  Renewed unease and anger pricked her. Perhaps he meant to sabotage her chances with the randon, she thought, not for the first time. If they finally accepted her, he would no longer be able to strip her of the rank that she had fought so hard to achieve—not, at
least, without insulting the Kencyr warrior class who, so far, supported him and whom he held in high regard. Without that status, though, what prevented him from dumping her back into the Women’s World where Highborn girls were nothing but chattel to be contracted out for the greatest political gain?

  Maybe, however, the Matriarchs could stop Torisen from foisting her on them again. No doubt they remembered all too well the miserable winter that Jame had spent in their halls when she had first rejoined the Kencyrath. A certain young sewing instructress was still prone to hysterics whenever her name was mentioned, or so Jame had heard.

  A faint aroma made her stomach growl. Her brother’s dinner, untouched, sat on the table in a nest of papers—cold roast chicken, bread, and cheese. Although it was hard to tell with his back turned, she thought that he looked thinner than when she had last seen him, almost a year ago, and he had always been slender. They shared that trait; people always underestimated them because of it. But this time, perhaps, it was something else.

  When Torisen’s steward Rowan had delivered his order that Jame attend him immediately upon her arrival, the scar-faced randon had added in a low voice, “Blackie hasn’t been quite himself since the end of winter. Walk wary.”

  At winter’s end, Tori would have learned about Brier.

  Dark shapes flitted past outside the window as sparrows came home to roost in the vines that climbed the tower. A breeze rustled ivy leaves. On the table, the haphazard pile of correspondence stirred. Jame noted that on many of the scrolls, the wax seal was intact. She wondered if their cousin, Kindrie Soul-walker, was still acting as her brother’s scribe. They had decided not to make it common knowledge that the white-haired Shanir was in truth a pure-blooded, legitimate Knorth, one of only three survivors of that ancient house from which the Highlord had always come. People might get ideas.

  If Torisen had pushed Kindrie away again, though . . .

  Their father, Ganth, had taught him to fear those of the Old Blood. Like Kindrie. Like Jame herself. She knew that, in some moods, she was indeed to be feared, but surely her twin brother with his bound household was Shanir himself. How could he not see that? She had walked in his dreams and in his soulscape, had felt the tension between harsh childhood lessons and adult responsibilities. He was a good man at heart, she told herself, doing his best to manage the flawed society which the Kencyrath had become. He needed her to sweep away the dead wood of the past and Kindrie to preserve that which was still worthwhile, but how could he while the ghost of their father whispered poison through the door in his soul-image which she herself had locked?

  A drop of blood trembled on a knife’s tip, falling into a cup of wine:

  Here, son. Drink to my health.

  Had Ganth tried to blood-bind the young Tori as their foul uncle Greshan had his younger brother Ganth? Did that explain the festering paternal splinter in Tori’s soul? If so, how did one root out such a thing?

  Ah, ha, ha, ha . . .

  “You spoke?” said Jame sharply.

  “I said, ‘Don’t touch those.’”

  Without thinking, she had reached out to steady the shifting mound of papers. She drew back her hand.

  “You claim that we had an agreement,” he said, his back still turned, his voice roughening as if it caught in his throat. “If so, it was based on the assumption that you could be trusted. Father said you would steal my people, and he was right. Whom else have you suborned besides the Southron Iron-thorn?”

  “If you think that anyone could corrupt Brier,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, “you don’t know her very well.”

  “I have known her since she was a child.”

  And so, of course, he had. Brier was the daughter of Rose Iron-thorn, who had died helping Torisen escape from the dungeons of Urakarn when he had been little more than a boy. He must be remembering that too: His hands had tightened behind his back. A flare of firelight caught their lacework of white scars drawn taut over fine bones.

  Jame remembered Brier drunk and raging in the Kothifir barracks, trying to drown the memory of the muffled snap of a baby’s neck. Its mother had flung it out the window of a burning tower. Brier had caught it. It had looked merely asleep in her arms, rosy with the heat, its tiny hands just beginning to relax, but it had been dead.

  “She said to hold its head just so . . .”

  The Highlord is kind, but do I deserve kindness? Do I trust it? Rather give me strength, even if it is cruel.

  “She was in despair,” Jame said to her brother’s back. “She needed support. You were too far away to give it.”

  And too weak, she nearly added, but was that true? As much as they might fight about other things, she and Torisen shared a deep respect for the Kendar and a reluctance to take advantage of them . . . or was that merely a failure of leadership, as the former Caineron Brier seemed to think?

  “I need you,” Jame had said to her, oh, in so many ways.

  That night, Brier’s bond to the Highlord had broken and a new one to his sister had formed.

  But am I strong enough to do her justice, Jame wondered now. If it comes to that, am I sufficiently cruel?

  She felt like being cruel to her brother, to break through his shell of denial. If she was potentially Destruction and Kindrie was becoming Preservation, then Tori must be Creation. Without all three of them aware of and accepting their roles, however, the Tyr-ridan would fail and with it the Kencyrath’s god-given mandate to defeat Perimal Darkling—a battle so old that many Kencyr seemed to have forgotten all about it. She could shatter Tori with truths he couldn’t bear to face. Perhaps she should. Or was that just the destroyer in her speaking?

  The wind came again, alternately bearing the tang of snow high on the surrounding mountain peaks and a promise of rain much needed since the failure of the southern wind earlier that season to bring moisture. The pile of scrolls shifted again. Some rattled to the floor and rolled in among the glowing embers. Parchment scorched, then burst into flames.

  Torisen glanced over his shoulder at the flash of light, his eyes a clouded silver gleam in his shadowed face.

  “I didn’t touch them,” said Jame.

  “You didn’t have to. Filthy Shanir . . .”

  “What?”

  But he had turned back to the window. The wind built, lifting the wings of his hair, weaving black and silver threads, and careened around the room as if trapped there. Thunder rolled closer. Rain spattered the window ledge. More scrolls tumbled into the fire, and smoldering logs near the back burst into flames. By their uncertain light, Jame thought she saw movement on the plate bearing Torisen’s dinner—mold crawling over the bread, maggots over the cheese and meat.

  Am I doing that?

  It was suddenly much colder, making her exhaled breath smoke. The rain turned to sleet, then hail that drove into the room and bounced off the floor, while overhead, the slate roof rattled. It must be pelting Torisen in the face, but he didn’t turn away from it. Jame thought she heard him mutter something, but his words were lost in the general uproar. She crossed the room to stand beside him.

  The hail was now whipping sideways, all but obscuring the view. A rush of sparrows outside the window made Jame flinch back. They were fleeing the shelter of the vines in a shrieking mob, to be snatched up by the wind and carried away. She leaned out and looked down, shielding her eyes with a hand. At first, she thought that wind and hail were thrashing the ivy; then she saw that it was crawling slowly up the wall. Rootlets groped for cracks and dug into them. Ice sliced through puffs of mortar dust as the mass of greenery dragged itself up inch by inch.

  “Destruction begins with love,” Torisen said through stiff lips, in a harsh voice not his own. “The power that seduces, that betrays. . . They are creatures of the shadows, poisoning men’s dreams, sucking out their souls . . . Cursèd be the lot of them . . .”

  “Who, Tori?”

  “Shanir. Women. You.”

  And he looked up at her through Ganth’s sullen, ra
ging eyes.

  For a moment, Jame was rendered speechless. Then, without thinking, she slapped him as hard as she could.

  He jerked back and blinked. His rigid expression seemed to melt with the rain that ran down his hollow cheeks and streamed off his beard.

  “Jame? When did you get here? What was I saying?”

  Scrabbling vines reached the window ledge and hesitated, tendrils waving uncertainly. Beneath them, loosened stones ground together like teeth, spitting out mortar dust, and the tower shivered.

  “Stop it,” said Torisen to Jame. “Get out. Now.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, gulped, and fled.

  II

  THE STORM PASSED THAT NIGHT, leaving havoc in its wake.

  Until then, it had been a mild spring and the crops were well advanced despite the lack of rain. Tomatoes, peas, and strawberries were now smashed down in their furrows, along with all new grain less than four inches high with undeveloped roots.

  Animals, too, had suffered. Horses and cattle in the fields had stampeded in panic. Lambs, foals, and calves that hadn’t been brought into shelter had been trampled or pummeled with hail the size of a child’s clenched fist. One clutch of chicks was found pounded into the mud, rendered virtually boneless but still feebly cheeping.

  Jame and her ten-command helped wherever they could—in the water meadow, until someone unlatched the flood gate and the inrushing Silver nearly carried them away; in the subterranean stable, until the horses spooked and, led by Torisen’s black stallion Storm, battered down the partition walls; around the old keep, until a workman replacing mortar above nearly dropped a loosened stone on Jame’s head. No one seemed to be deliberately trying to hurt her, but things kept happening. Finally, on the tenth day after their arrival, Rowan sent them to the relative safety of the apple orchard north of Gothregor, to save as much of it as they could.

  The trees had been in bloom when the storm struck and had suffered as much from the sharp, accompanying frost as from the wind and pelting hail. Some were completely blighted, with leaves and blossoms turning black. Many had broken limbs. Others lay on their sides, gnarled roots clutching at the sky. All needed either pruning or removal.